Migrating a listener port to an activation specification for use with the WebSphere MQ messaging provider

For WebSphere® Application Server Version 7 and later, listener ports are stabilized. You must therefore plan to migrate your WebSphere MQ message-driven bean deployment configurations from using listener ports to using activation specifications.

Before you begin

EJB 2.0 message-driven beans cannot be configured against JCA 1.5-compliant resources. If your bean is an EJB 2.0 application, upgrade it to EJB 3 or EJB 2.1 before you complete this task.

Note: You can continue to configure EJB 3, EJB 2.1, and EJB 2.0 message-driven beans against a listener port. You might want to do this for compatibility with existing message-driven bean applications. However, listener ports are stabilized, and you should plan to migrate all your message-driven beans to use JCA 1.5-compliant or 1.6-compliant resources.

About this task

For WebSphere Application Server Version 7 and later, listener ports are stabilized. For more information, read the topic about stabilized features. Plan to migrate your WebSphere MQ message-driven bean deployment configurations from using listener ports to using activation specifications. However, you should not begin this migration until you are sure the application does not have to work on application servers earlier than WebSphere Application Server Version 7. For example, if you have an application server cluster with some members at Version 6.1 and some at a later version, you should not migrate applications on that cluster to use activation specifications until after you migrate all the application servers in the cluster to the later version. [z/OS]Also, when you migrate to activation specifications on the z/OS® platform, you must enable the Control Region Adjunct (CRA) process of the application server (either by selecting Enable JCA based inbound message delivery on the JMS provider settings panel, or by using the manageWMQ command to include starting the CRA process as part of starting an application server).

Note that the Maximum retries listener port setting is not migrated to the new activation specification as there is no exact equivalent.

When you are migrating a listener port associated with a message-driven bean (MDB) that has the subscriptionDurability activation configuration property set to Durable, and that MDB already has an active durable subscription, the durable subscription is not migrated. This is because listener ports and WebSphere MQ activation specifications use incompatible forms of subscription name. As a result there can be two active durable subscriptions subscribed to the relevant topic for the same MDB. As part of the migration process, you must delete the old durable subscription that was associated with the listener port and manually clean up any messages associated with it. For information on how do to this see the WebSphere MQ and IBM® Integration Bus documentation.

Procedure

  1. Start the administrative console.
  2. In the navigation pane, expandServers > Server Types > WebSphere application servers->server_name > [Communications] Messaging > Message listener service > [Additional Properties] Listener Ports > listener_port

    The Message listener port collection panel is displayed.

  3. Select the listener port that you want to work with by selecting the check box next to the listener port name.
  4. Click Convert to activation specification to start the Convert listener port to activation specification wizard.
  5. On the Step1: Supply activation specification name page, enter the following information then click Next to continue:
    • The name of the new activation specification to be created.
    • The JNDI name of the new activation specification.
    • The scope of the new activation specification (Server, Node, Cluster, Cell). Note that Cluster only appears when the server is in a cluster.
  6. On the Step2: Summary page,
    click Finish to complete the creation of the new activation specification.
  7. Stop then restart the application server.
  8. To complete the configuration of the activation specification, see Configuring an activation specification for the WebSphere MQ messaging provider.